Ballet and science: apparently alien disciplines – but are they more closely linked than you might think? In recent years, reciprocal influences between the two fields have developed as scientists have researched the physics behind the art form, and choreographers have been inspired to create works based on scientific concepts and theories.

Connectome is Alastair Marriott’s first ballet to draw on science – specifically, neuroscience. His ballet in four movements, set to haunting music by Arvo Pärt, is influenced by the cutting-edge research of Dr Sebastian Seung. Seung’s theory of connectomes (maps of the connections in the brain) explores how neural wiring is formed, and attempts to determine the extent to which it shapes a person’s identity. The ballet’s designers, Es Devlin, Bruno Poet and Luke Halls, used imagery of connectomes as the basis for their dazzling set and video projections, against which Marriott’s choreography depicts the developing identities of a central female figure and two men whose paths cross with hers. He explains: ‘I mapped out certain emotional aspects of life – interactions with other people such as infatuation, spirituality, loss and finally chaos and order… you start and finish life alone but you change over time so you have a very complex connectome by the end’.

The ballet’s penultimate section, set to Pärt’s Silouan’s Song, is an intense, yearning pas de deux between the female protagonist and a male partner. At the beginning of the movement, a glittering, broken-up image of a connectome is projected onto hundreds of white poles that descend from above. These poles rise to reveal the man and woman lying on the ground, their limbs extended and feet touching, resembling the fused neural pathways pictured behind them. As the projection of the connectome revolves, the couple too begins to roll – feet still conjoined – before spinning round and then unfurling again, the woman arching her torso between the man’s outstretched legs.

The theme of contact and connection established in these opening seconds forms the basis of the pas de deux. The dancers stretch, cambré and lean through entangled, constantly moving partner-work that appears to mirror the imagery of the connectome – in which synapses are joined, detached and re-formed – while also suggesting the close relationship between the couple. At one particularly striking moment of connection, the woman folds back into the man’s body and he suspends her off the floor – not with his arms, which are stretched above his head, but by gripping her leg between his thighs. And a little later, he leans forwards and lifts her onto his back as she reaches an arm and a leg skywards and then draws them back, quivering, charged with emotion.

Towards the end of the duet, this involved, magnetic union seems to break down. The man looks distracted, beginning to wander off, and the woman’s movements are increasingly despondent. When the pair come together, they grasp onto one another with a hint of desperation – especially on her part. Pärt’s score builds to an agonized climax as the man whirls the woman round wildly once, then again, and she kicks out. As it dissipates, a strange calm is resumed. He cradles her, slowly spinning, and she encircles him lovingly with her arms – but suddenly the man melts to the floor, falling backwards. The woman’s arms remain curved in front of her, reaching out for her partner. As the connectome behind them fades into blackness, it seems she has lost him.

Alastair Marriott’s Connectome is inspired in part by the theories of Dr Sebastian Seung, who argues that it is not our genes that give us our identity, but the connections between our brain cells – our ‘connectome’. Everybody’s individual connectome is made up of their personal memories, intellect and experiences, and through re-creating and decoding this complex network we can gain a sense of how the workings of the mind shape who we are.

A Journey through Life

Connectome received its premiere in 2014. It features a lone female dancer and two male principals. As the woman journeys through life, her interactions with the two men shape her developing sense of identity. A small corps of four male dancers completes the cast, adding further complexities to the network of connections. Acclaimed set designer Es Devlin collaborated with lighting designer Bruno Poet and projection creator Luke Halls to complete the stage picture.

Sublime Simplicity

The music for Connectome consists of four pieces by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt: Fratres, Vater Unser, Silouans Song and Wenn Bach Bienen gezüchtet hätte… One of the most widely performed living composers, Pärt writes in what he calls a ‘tintinnabuli style’, marked by its sublime simplicity and calmness. Pärt’s music returns to the Royal Opera House later this Season, when his Tabula Rasa and Spiegel im Spiegel accompany Christopher Wheeldon’s After the Rain.

Raven Girl is the story of the daughter of a Postman and a Raven. She longs to be able to fly, but has no wings. A Doctor appears with the promise of help, but can he transform her into the raven she longs to be?

Voices of SpringFrederick Ashton created the Voices of Springpas de deux as a divertissement for The Royal Opera’s first production of Johann Strauss II’s operetta Die Fledermaus, first performed in 1977 on New Year’s Eve. Ashton used Strauss’s lively Frühlingsstimmen waltz from 1883 (some years after the operetta’s 1874 premiere). His jubilant choreography is filled with gravity-defying lifts – the ballerina appears twice to walk on air – and flurries of dazzling, weightless steps. It was first performed as a stand-alone piece in 1978, and has been a regular feature of The Royal Ballet’s repertory ever since.

Borrowed Light
Choreographer and Royal Ballet Principal Character Artist Alastair Marriott created Borrowed Light on Royal Ballet First Artist Marcelino Sambé, for the inaugural Ann Maguire Gala in 2015. A personal reflection on ‘borrowed light’ – the idea of light entering a dark space from another source – the piece exhibits Sambé’s virtuosity, while at the same time moving away from the typical male bravura solo to highlight more sensitive, expressive elements. Marriott used Philip Glass’s Piano Etude No.2, while his regular collaborator Jonathan Howells (a Soloist with the Company) designed Sambé’s costume.

‘Le Beau Gosse’ from Le Train bleuLe Train bleu originated as an all-star collaboration for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1924, with choreography by Bronislava Nijinska, scenario by Jean Cocteau, music by Darius Milhaud, costumes by Coco Chanel and a backdrop by Pablo Picasso. It was then not performed for more than sixty years until a revival by Oakland Ballet Company in 1989; it returned to Paris, its original home, in 1992. There is no blue train, despite the ballet’s title: Diaghilev wrote, ‘This being the age of speed, it has already reached its destination and disembarked its passengers’ – a group of fashionable Europeans on a Mediterranean holiday. The solo performed by Vadim Muntagirov and James Hay is ‘Le Beau Gosse’ (the Handsome Young Chap).

Aeternum pas de deuxChristopher Wheeldon choreographed his Olivier Award-winning ballet Aeternum in 2013, setting it to Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da requiem in recognition of the composer’s centenary year. In this pas de deux, which opens the third section of the ballet, Wheeldon’s choreography incorporates weightlessness with more grounded movement and moments of tension and release in a never-ending stream of motion that eloquently reflects Britten’s transcendent ‘Requiem aeternam’.

Carousel pas de deuxRodgers and Hammerstein’s 1945 musical Carousel is dark in its themes. A young girl, Julie Jordan, falls for carousel roustabout Billy Bigelow. They marry, he mistreats her, and is then killed while attempting a robbery, leaving Julie to raise their child alone. Director Nicholas Hytner asked Kenneth MacMillan to create the choreography for a 1992 revival at the National Theatre; MacMillan agreed, but died of a heart attack before finishing the choreography. This pas de deux was one of the last things he worked on. This famous ballet sequence sees Billy – now dead, but allowed to return to earth for a day – watch his young daughter, Louise, falling for the leader of a group of roustabouts, just as her mother had for Billy. The pas de deux has the intensity of emotion and complex undercurrents that are such familiar signatures of MacMillan’s greatest work.

But look closer and there's a lot more to it than that. Throughout his life Britten was fascinated by what may be best termed as 'functional' music – 'I want my music to be of use to people', he said – and dance, of course, was a key part of that. In his operas he drew on the social purposes of dance almost as much as he drew on folk music: we see dance music used to give a sense of community in Peter Grimes, of ceremony in Gloriana, of rambunctious jollity in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

In his final opera, Death in Venice, dance becomes as much a part of the fabric of the work as singing. The beautiful young Tadzio, innocent object of ageing writer Aschenbach's impossible adoration, is cast as a dancer. His muteness and distant power, so clearly at a remove from the sung world of Aschenbach, come to represent not only in the essential futility of the older man's love, but also – in Aschenbach's fevered mind – the incarnation of physical freedom against the ordered rigidity of his own existence.

Brandstrup first worked with Britten's music in 1992, choreographing Death in Venice for Graham Vick's Royal Opera production. ‘Its elegiac tone has undoubtedly coloured the way I listen to all of his music', he says. Brandstrup finds this colouring in the relatively early work Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, which he has used for Ceremony of Innocence, created for the 2013 Aldeburgh Festival. ‘It demonstrates the lightness of touch and the ease of a brilliant young composer who had been a child prodigy, a boy wonder – yet at the centre of Variations is a Funeral March and the final music, at least to my ears, seems to have the same weight and tone as the end of Death in Venice.’

Wheeldon too has had a long affinity with Britten, after dancing with The Royal Ballet for Kenneth MacMillan's production of The Prince of the Pagodas in 1989. 'Since then I’ve choreographed Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge and also the Diversions for Piano (left hand) and Orchestra – twice'. In his Olivier Award-winning Aeternum he uses Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem, which Britten described in a letter as 'Combining my ideas on war & a memorial for Mum & Pop'. For Wheeldon, 'The music weaves in and out from the sombre repetitive churching of the “Lacrymosa” to this crazy, devilish second movement and then finally to the very beautiful, light-filled, off-to-a-better-place third movement' – a structure clearly reflected in Wheeldon's choreography.

Great choreographers before Brandstrup and Wheeldon have also been drawn to Britten’s music. John Cranko created the choreography for the original productions of Gloriana and The Prince of the Pagodas. Frederick Ashton choreographed the premiere of Death in Venice; his three one-act ballets to Britten include the fascinating Les Illuminations for New York City Ballet, an intriguing setting of Britten’s Rimbaud song cycle that includes a pierrot who dances with one foot bare and the other on pointe. MacMillan’s Britten works include Winter’s Eve (created for his then-mistress Nora Kaye), a version of Soirées musicales and Gloriana dances (which shocked Ashton with choreography that has Queen Elizabeth I flung about with MacMillan’s customary flair for daring lifts). And today choreographers such as David Bintley, Alastair Marriott and Liam Scarlett continue to find inspiration in his music.

Fairy and Mortal Worlds CollideFrederick Ashton’s The Dream received its premiere in April 1964, as part of The Royal Ballet’s celebrations for the 400th anniversary of the birth of Shakespeare. Based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the ballet captures the comic confusion that arises in the play as mortal and fairy worlds collide. However, it is more than a straightforward narrative. By drawing on the unique personalities and talents of his dancers – most notably Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell as Titania and Oberon – Ashton created complex characters whose inner thoughts and feelings are brought to life through virtuoso choreography.

Mendelssohn’s DreamThe score for The Dream is the incidental music Felix Mendelssohn wrote for an 1842 production of the play, compiled and arranged by John Lanchbery to suit Ashton’s simplified version of the story. It demonstrates the composer’s unique gift for orchestration – from the lively Scherzo with its chattering woodwind and strings to the majestic brass in the famous Wedding March – and transports the audience to the ballet’s magical fairy realm.

Decoding ‘Connectome’For his new ballet, choreographer Alastair Marriott was in part inspired by Dr Sebastian Seung's theories about 'connectomes'. A connectome is a comprehensive map of the connections in the brain. Re-creating and decoding this complex network can, Seung argues, unlock the workings of the mind, and help us examine the extent to which neural wiring shapes our very identity.

Science and EmotionMarriott was inspired by the idea that a person’s memories, personality and intellect may all be determined by the make-up of their connectome. His choreography maps out four particular emotional aspects of life, which he derived from his interpretations of the four pieces by Arvo Pärt he selected for the ballet's score. Similarly, designs by Es Devlin, Bruno Poet and Luke Halls were influenced by both instinctive, personal experiences and the imagery and scientific theories linked to the connectome.

A Comic MasterpieceThe Concert (or The Perils of Everybody) entered the repertory of The Royal Ballet in 1975. Set to a series of nine pieces by Fryderyk Chopin, the work depicts the quirks and reveries of a concert audience at a recital. Robbins allowed the music to define the personality and disposition of the ballet’s characters and took inspiration from programmatic names given to the pieces, such as the lovely ‘Butterfly’ Etude, to create a ballet full of wit, slapstick and genuinely laugh-out-loud moments, in what is generally agreed to be the funniest ballet ever created.

The notion that a person’s memories, personality and intellect may all be encoded in their connectome greatly intrigued Alastair Marriott and he used it to crystallize ideas that had already been emerging for his newest ballet:
'It gave me a framework and starting position to base the whole work around. I mapped out certain emotional aspects of a life – interactions with other people such as infatuation, spirituality, loss and finally chaos and order – which I derived from my interpretations of the music. You start and finish life alone but you change over time so you have a very complex connectome by the end.'

For the music, Marriott selected four separate pieces by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.

'I felt like they belonged to some kind of a cycle. One of the things about Pärt’s music is that, whether you’re religious or not, I think we all have a sense of spirituality and that’s what his music speaks to. Before composers like Pärt, John Tavener and Henryk Górecki, contemporary music had become very disjointed but they made it okay to feel emotionally involved again. I found it interesting to juxtapose that against a cold scientific explanation of why we experience all our very deep feelings.'

Profound emotions were something that Marriott had to go through when he first began planning Connectome, and the choice of music turned out to have a far bigger impact on him personally than he could possibly have envisaged.

'My father died just as I was starting the ballet and at first I wasn’t really sure if I could concentrate on making it. He’d always been interested in what I was creating and, because he loved singing, I’d taken him recordings of the four choirboys who auditioned for the ballet’s second movement to see which one he liked. He actually chose the same one that conductor Barry Wordsworth eventually decided on and I’d hoped that he’d be able to see the finished result. It definitely affected my choreography, and if it made the outcome sadder than I’d initially planned then that’s part of my own personal connectome.'

Marriott deliberately chose a small cast in order to keep things intimate. The one female dancer in the piece is central, but alongside her character and the two other Principals, he’s used four dancers who aren’t yet such familiar names on the cast sheets.

'Although you can see all three of the main characters’ connectomes growing I think people will identify most with the woman. I’ve worked with Sarah Lamb many times before – she’s a fantastic dancer and knows what sort of movement appeals to me – and I really wanted to work with Natalia Osipova for the first time. She has this thoroughly modern ballerina body, capable of huge extensions and massive jumps, but her incredible technique is not the foremost thing in her mind, it’s the artistic element that she’s aiming for; she’s an exhilarating combination of classical ballet and free movement. We’ve had a very positive experience with all the dancers in the studio. The four boys I chose as soloists are actually from the corps but I made ballets on them when they were still at school. I think it’ll be exciting to see some of the most famous dancers in the world next to these very young men who haven’t really had the chance to show off their talents on the main stage yet.'